Tim Worstall

Ministers are to announce plans to allow magistrates to sit on their own in community centres or police stations in a bid to speed up justice. They’ve just spent a decade or more closing down local Magistrate’s Courts and organising them into more “efficient” regional ones. And this? Sittings would take place in varied locations [...]

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The Roberts court redefines judicial activism: it is pursuing a states’ rights, anti-federal agenda, reckless of the constitution That’s the subs getting it wrong of course. A State’s rights agenda is a pro-federal agenda. For that’s what federal means, that there are multiple sovereignties and a division of powers between them. The opposite to State’s [...]

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Mr Justice Mitting indicated that he would reconsider the preacher’s detention if his deportation was “not imminent”. Yesterday Theresa May, the Home Secretary, was faced with mounting evidence that her officials had made an error over a deadline for Qatada, whose real name is Omar Othman, to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, [...]

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Won’t find me saying that often but this case: A 16th century masterpiece has been returned to the heirs of a Jewish man, 70 years after being wrested away during World War II. They knew the painting was in an Itlaian government run museum, they were trying to get it back. No dice, no one [...]

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Renounce European Court, Britain urged Britain should turn its back on the European Court of Human Rights because its rulings on the extradition of terrorist suspects risk undermining the special relationship, a former US ambassador said. For I do think we should withdraw from the Council of Europe (seriously, who thinks it is a good [...]

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In Britain, even the most minor convictions for student pranks or breaches of the peace can come back to haunt jobseekers years later if they apply for positions as teachers, policemen or other “sensitive” roles. But migrants from EU countries applying for the same jobs will be given a clean bill of health, even if [...]

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Contracts are pretty much inviolable here in our Common Law system. And I’m even more worried than Nick Drew about this. Because contracts are inviolable peepsw are asking, and some have got, that tax regimes etc should be contractual, not just legislative. For future governments can always change the law but those contracts will still [...]

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There are situations that come along where the law proves itself to be wholly perverse. This is clearly one of them. If the courts are not willing or able to take a stand, Parliament needs to immediately intervene with laws that apply retrospectively so as to clear this woman’s criminal record. Dear God no. For [...]

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As there was in Granny Roseleen so there is in Jenny McCartney: Here’s how I like my law: sharp, clear and tightly worded, so that everyone – even those with soup for brains and the morals of an alley cat – knows when it is being broken. For an example of how not to do [...]

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“These figures are a shocking reminder of the divide between the housing haves and have nots in this country,” Campbell Robb, the chief executive of Shelter, said. “Amid growing economic gloom and rising unemployment, increasing numbers of ordinary families are falling victim to our housing crisis. Some may be priced out of the housing market, [...]

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The first thing we do, let’s kill all lawyers”, says a Jack Cade rebel in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2. It always gets a laugh and a whoop or two. Kenneth Clarke, secretary of state for justice, knows his audience too: few hearts bleed at cutting lawyers’ fees. Naturally he blurs the difference between fat [...]

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Christopher Tappin, the British pensioner extradited to the US on charges of conspiring to supply weapons parts to Iran, has been denied bail by a Texan court. For, by definition, if you’ve been extradited then you’ve had to be dragged into the jurisdiction of the court. So, obviously, you’re more of a flight risk than [...]

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Lynne Featherstone directly challenges the role of the Church in the debate over homosexual weddings, saying it does not “own” marriage. Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Miss Featherstone says the Government has a right to change the definition of marriage and pledges to challenge those who “want to leave tradition alone”. Citing the words of [...]

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And quite rightly too. A senior immigration judge said yesterday that Qatada could be released despite even his own defence team suggesting that he posed a “grave risk” to Britain’s national security. ‘Coz there’s rules, see? We get to jail you if we’ve tried you and found you guilty of a crime: something that was [...]

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The corporation had said there was an overwhelming case for the court’s intervention because of the impact on the churchyard of the camp. The limited interference with the protesters’ rights entailed in the removal of the tents was justified and proportionate, given the rights and freedoms of others, it argued. There’s a trade off of [...]

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Lord Judge, the Lord Chief Justice, said juries should be allowed to consider the fact a victim had been unfaithful as a possible provocation – in defiance of a new law that banned it as an excuse. How did we end up with a law that said that such infidelity could not be used as [...]

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No, not because I’m some scumbag racist, no, not because it’s a bad idea that murderers go to jail. Rather, this: But in 2005 a chink of light emerged when the double jeopardy rule was abolished, meaning the men could be re-tried. Double jeopardy is one of our protections against them. Us as citizens against [...]

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Seven years after a statutory instrument updating nature regulations glided virtually unobserved through Westminster, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has this week admitted it “unlawfully” put a new crime on the statute books. The unintended outcome of the rarely deployed Wildlife & Countryside Act 1981 Amendment Regulations, Statutory Instrument (SI) 1487/2004, [...]

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The Trust points out that the existing document emphasises economic growth as a major driver for development. Although it mentions open spaces, sport and leisure as important factors to consider there is no mention of culture or the arts. In a response to the Minister’s current plans it said: “An arts facility (for example, one [...]

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I’ve forgotten. Stanford first began complaining of “extensive retrograde amnesia” from the jailhouse attack sometime after he arrived at Butner in February, according to the prosecutors’ filing. “Stanford has recently repeatedly claimed being ‘completely amnestic to his life prior to the assault, stating that 59 years were stolen,’” Costa said in the filing, citing the [...]

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